Language Gamification

Gamification may be bullshit, but does that mean it might be just the tool to fight your own, personal brand of bullshit?

Learning foreign languages is hard. Really hard. Part of this has to do with complex neurological reasons, which can only be explained using words like neuroplasticity and monolinguals. Yes, some of the difficulty is hard-wired. But additionally, a part of you just doesn’t like learning foreign languages. It’s complicated and easy to forget, requires a lot of memorization, and you can still sound like an idiot after years of practice. Sometimes the linguistic variations are impossible to pronounce or hear, or the grammatical structures are completely foreign to your mental processes. So you make up bullshit: reasons to skip or skimp on practice, or give up altogether. Learning a foreign language is a constant battle against your lazier self.

But Duolingo changes the game, so to speak. It gamifies the process of learning a foreign language, adding daily goals, streaks of meeting your daily goal, unlocking mechanics, currency and purchasing, and total progress towards fluency. Now, it’s not a particularly good way of learning a language. In fact, it’s terrible at teaching. But really, teaching isn’t the point of Duolingo. It’s just a way of defeating your bullshit by replacing it with a more benign type of bullshit.

Duolingo assigns tangible, meaningless progression to the real, intangible progress of learning a language. Without Duolingo as a external, concrete arbiter that says “Yes you are getting better”, learning a language can feel hopeless because no matter how much you master it, there are always more words to learn, faster sentences to parse, and structures you don’t understand. Now, the “percent fluency” that Duolingo feeds you doesn’t necessarily correspond to any real gains, but it affirms that the hard mental work you put in today actually paid off in some continuing educational journey. And that affirmation is what makes you come back the next day to learn more.